Carogna Products Greatly Ease Tubular Tire Installation

Most road bikes today come equipped with clincher tires, which are held on the rims by the pressure inside the tire pushing the sides of the tire (the “beads”) into the rim and locking the tires on. This works great and makes it easy to remove the tire to fix a flat by replacing or patching the tube inside.

But there’s another type of wheel and tire, actually the best-performing setup, too. It’s called a “tubular” wheel and tire (also known as a “sewup,” so-called because the tire is sewn shut around the tube). Tubulars are still found on most professional road racing bicycles because the box-section design of the rim and full-round shape of the tire allow the combination to be significantly lighter than clinchers, and also because the ride quality and puncture resistance is better.

One of the main reasons tubular wheels and tires – even with their superior performance – aren’t used by more regular riders is because the tires have to be glued onto the rims. If gluing tires onto wheels sounds crazy to you, you’re not alone. And you can understand why this wheel system has lost popularity.

Carogna’s Gluing Tape and Remover are designed to make it much easier for anyone to glue on tubular tires. A new and growing rider group that will love these products is anyone resurrecting an old road bike to join a L’Eroica event, because those are typically rigs that came with tubular wheels back in the day.

Carogna Tape

Let’s look at the tape first. To appreciate its value, understand that the standard method of gluing on tubular tires involves spreading multiple layers of extremely sticky and runny glue on both the rim and the tire basetape. You then wait for the final coats to become tacky before literally wrestling the tire onto the wheel and furiously trying to seat the tire and true the tread before the glue fully takes hold and locks the rubber in place.

Unless you’re skilled at this you can end up with glue all over the braking surfaces on the sides of the rim and on the tire sidewalls, too (or too little glue – allowing the tire to roll right off!). And tubular glue is difficult to remove. If you use solvents, you have to be careful not to get them on the tire or they may damage it. The other difficult thing is getting tires to go on straight; you can end up with a wobble that you feel when riding. Not good.

All that hassle goes away with Carogna Tape. You peel the backing off the rim side and simply place and press down to stick it onto the rim. Next you place your tire on top of the tape. Because the backing is still on that side of the tape, you can take your time aligning the tire onto the rim and getting the tread perfect. Once it is, you gently pull out the backing and the tape’s tire adhesive does its job and secures the tire.

Carogna isn’t the first company to come out with tubular tire tape like this. There are older and less expensive brands out there. However, Carogna tape has some unique engineering. On their website, they describe these features:

“Carogna Tape has specific properties on each side. It’s semi-structural and removable on the rim side. The adhesion is guaranteed by industrial-grade acrylic glue, native to the basetape of the tire. This means that when removing the tubular (breaking its bond with the rim) the acrylic glue will stay on the tape, not on the rim. Acrylic has a good adhesion on both aluminum and carbon without any specific surface preparation.

“On the tubular side of the tape, there’s a 1 mm thick layer of a recently developed permanent glue for underwater applications. This thick glue film will move and spread when the tubular is first inflated, ensuring optimized contact with any tubular basetape geometry. Humidity is obviously not an issue, and this glue adheres well to any kind of basetape material (nylon, cotton, polycotton) or external finishing (raw/brushed, or coated by neoprene).”

Carogna Remover

When you want to glue a tire on a used rim that’s caked with old glue, you’ll be delighted to have a tube of Carogna Remover on hand. Dried glue can be a pain to remove by scraping and by using toxic chemicals like acetone. But if you have lumpy dried glue on a wheel, you need to remove it or else your new tire won’t stick to the rim and may sit crooked, too.

Carogna’s Remover is easy to use, fume-free and is not dangerous or flammable. It’s safe for use on all rim materials. It’s a red gel that you spread or brush onto the rim and let sit for 2 to 12 hours.

The remover stays put and doesn’t run or drip. As you wait, it turns old glue into a gel-like substance, which can be rubbed or gently scraped off rims.

If you’ve ever spent hours chipping hard dried glue off a tubular rim, you’ll dance for joy when you see how easy Carogna strips the rim for you.

Summing up, if you ride tubular wheels and tires and aren’t an expert at using regular glues, you’ll love the ease of Carogna Tape tire installation. And I’ve never seen anything that cleaned old glue off a used rim easier than Carogna Remover. These 2 products make it a loteasier for anyone to give tubulars a try.

Jim Langley is RBR’s Technical Editor. He has been a pro mechanic and cycling writer for more than 40 years. He’s the author of Your Home Bicycle Workshop in the RBR eBookstore. Check out his “cycling aficionado” website at http://www.jimlangley.net, his Q&A blog and updates at Twitter. Jim’s streak of consecutive cycling days has reached more than 8,000. Click to read Jim’s full bio.